Savage Inn, the Gun Tavern, and ‘the little à la mode beef shop off Sloane Square’. He could not accept too much hospitality from the Macdonalds, who were now living in Walpole Street, their father having been appointed to the London circuit; he could not apply to Mr Jones, who was still struggling on with Miss Sampson, waiting for the grand historical painting. Unlike Rossetti, he had nothing to pawn. Finally,
I was very hard up and much in want of the smallest sums of money – so I asked a lady who had been a friend of my mother’s – almost the only one I knew who had been intimate with her, and asked her to lend me two pounds – but she didn’t send me anything, only wrote back to say that she hoped my present straits to [sic] teach me in future. So I got nothing by that but humiliation, and you may guess whether I was furious or not, and I made up my mind that nothing should ever induce me to ask anyone for money again.’3
It had not occurred to him that an appeal to his dead mother’s name would fail; and though Burne-Jones’s finances are a complicated study, he never did borrow money from an individual again.
The necessary things were not eating and sleeping, but being with Rossetti and learning to paint. When he had the boat fare, he went from Chelsea to Blackfriars by river; otherwise he walked, but he was not allowed to go to Chatham Place every day. He was permitted to watch Rossetti make the initial drawing in pencil and go over it in violet carmine, and then to come back again three or four days later, but never to see ‘the hard stage’.4 This ‘overlooking’, with the glorious encouragement of Rossetti, who believed at this time that English poetry had come to an end with Keats but English painting was only just beginning, was all the apprenticeship Burne-Jones had until he attended evening classes in the following year. Everything else had to come by the way as he worked.
To recommend himself further to his master, who was in reality only six years older than himself but seemed so much more, Burne-Jones tried to turn himself into a Londoner. It was a kind of saturation process, to produce what Henry James called a ‘cockney convaincu’. First Rossetti’s language must be imitated; a good deal of it Ned knew already – ‘stunner’ was current in Oxford in 1850, so were ‘ripper’, ‘spiffy’, ‘cheesy’, ‘jammy’, ‘spoony’, ‘nobble’, ‘stock-dolloger’ (for a knock-down blow), ‘ticker’ (for watch), ‘crib’ (for lodgings), and ‘tin’ (for money) but ‘tinlessness’, and perhaps ‘bogeys’ for the spirits of the departed, were additions by Rossetti; so was the richly resonant, not quite English intonation which carried with ease ‘through rolling drums’. Then the ‘great Italian’ would walk the streets half the night, trailing his umbrella under stars and gaslight, and leaving Ned ill with tiredness: ‘it became too much for me, it would have killed me.’5 Nevertheless, when he was not allowed to accompany Rossetti he would tramp round himself, as though the nightmare of The Cousins had come true, past the terrible nightly parade of prostitutes and child prostitutes in the Haymarket, the pawnbrokers who would accept anything – even babies’ coffins if the babies could be got out of them – and the doorways which were the last refuge of the homeless. ‘What walks I have had in London streets,’ he wrote to Mrs Gaskell, ‘haunted walks – wretched ones.’6 He grew to like barrel-organs, because they were the music of the streets. Not to be touched by it was a proof of hard-heartedness. Of London brutality he kept a curious memory. When the Guards were brought back from the Crimea in 1856 and passed by, almost every man mutilated or bandaged, he saw the crowd laugh at them.7 Probably at this time he had a hallucination which recurred at intervals throughout his life: a man with a black bag would come up to him in the street, whistle in his ear, say ‘God bless you’ and quietly move away.8
With amazement Ned tried to adapt himself to Rossetti’s careless and lordly domestic arrangements. He was not introduced to Lizzie Siddal, although she had returned to London in May 1856 and was living in her own rooms in Weymouth Street. Except for the landlady’s occasional ‘wench’, there seemed to be no one in attendance. The studio itself, where the artist presided in a long flannel gown over a plum-coloured frock coat, had none of his ‘discrimination for all that was splendid’. The whole place was full of junk. There were musical instruments that could not be played, broken furniture, and the despised books; on one occasion Rossetti threw out of the window all the books that ‘obstructed life’, but the river returned them in a stinking heap. Bills were not regarded as they were in Birmingham. Accounts were not paid, colourmen and wine merchants protested, a Jewish pawnbroker arrived and swept away most of Rossetti’s trousers for only £3, leaving him ‘rather shabby’. With this went a natural prodigality. ‘What he did he did in a moment of time, design was as easy as drinking wine … I used to say to him, why do you paint in colour that you know is not permanent? But he wouldn’t listen to me or entertain the point for a moment.’9 In the studio Ned saw drawings scratched out, thrown away, stuffed in drawers which, if he had dared to open them, would have shown him dozens of beautiful pencil and pen and ink studies of Lizzie. Watercolour was not used as it was by David Cox or in the ‘Views’ in Mr Jones’s back shop, but mixed with gum, hatched and stippled and applied with a dry brush, or scraped away to make the white lights. A set which had been given to Burne-Jones were produced, Malcolm Bell tells us, when Rossetti called, ‘in all their wrappings and protections. Without a word Rossetti took them and to their owner’s horror and dismay, tore the whole set in two and went away.’ This was intended as a sign that Ned, who was timidly painting on a background study, had progressed far enough not to need them. Still more amazing was Rossetti’s scorn of patrons, and the violence of his opinions. He advised his pupil to turn over the pages of Mrs Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, ‘and when you come to the name of Rubens, spit here’.10 Indeed, Rossetti used the strongest language Ned had ever heard. ‘The first time he used a bad word, he saw that I was shocked, but he said in his lofty way, you must know, Ned, that I’ve tried to eliminate that word from my dictionary but find I can’t do without it.’11 Other evidence (for example Allingham’s diary) suggests that this word was ‘bloody’, but the recent publication of one of Rossetti’s limericks, preserved by Bertrand Russell, opens up many other possibilities.
Saving was not a virtue at Chatham Place, morality was not; generosity ruled, but Rossetti took as well as gave. ‘I’m sure there wasn’t a woman in the world he couldn’t have won for himself! Nothing pleased him better, though, than to take a friend’s mistress away from him.’12 By 1855 Rossetti had broken with Annie Miller, but the search for ‘cordian stunners’, red-haired and wheaten-haired models, went on by day and night, and Fanny Cornforth appeared in the studio. Burne-Jones felt, like the warmth of a fire, the expanding sexuality of the ménage. The temptation of his ingenuousness was sometimes too much for Rossetti. ‘Jones is an angel on earth and too good to be true,’ he told Boyce. But Burne-Jones told Rooke that Gabriel:
once gave a woman 5/- to go after me – one night as I was going quietly to my bus. He told her I was very timid and shy and wanted her to speak to me. I saw him talking to her as I looked back, and then she came after me and I couldn’t get rid of her. I said no, my dear, I’m just going home – I’m never haughty with those poor things, but it was no use, she wouldn’t go, and there we marched arm-in-arm down Regent Street – I don’t know what any of my friends would have thought if he had caught sight of me.13
Some of these experiences were lessons on what to avoid. But there were two deeper patterns that Burne-Jones began to study from Rossetti. The first was the art of concealment. Rossetti himself carefully separated the mystical and superstitious self, darkly concerned with the coincidence of his name and life with Dante’s, from the respectable son and brother to his family, and again from the dashing cove, more English than the English, and familiar with pawnbrokers, slop-shops and music-halls. The work which was the magic mirror of the manifest heart could equally be called ‘my rubbish’ or ‘the daubs’. Burne-Jones was to find increasingly over the years that there was a solace in manoeuvring the different aspects of his own personality, sometimes to disconcert people, often to keep them at a distance. And character can be fragmented by space as well as time. Different as he was, as a human being, from Rossetti, Burne-Jones also was to feel himself ‘twice-born’, an inhabitant of two centuries at once.
The